What do you do when the sun sets?
You push the damn brakes!
How do we break through the dread? How do we wake up consistently and find hope everyday?
All I know is that it is immensely difficult, and whenever I or anybody else over simplifies the practice of living well, that’s disillusion. Sweat and tears my friends, it takes overcoming negatives in all of their forms on an hourly basis, the overt and covert kind. It takes a lot of courage and faith. It takes faith to look at a difficult situation and somehow deep down translate it into hope. It takes persistence and trust to produce something good out of your life. And I am here to tell you, if you can do that at least 50% of the time; well then good job. You are trying, and happiness follows that process always. You deserve this moment.
The movie Moment
Let’s go back together to that movie scene that is always so enthralling, so freeing- the Hollywood movie moment- where one stands atop a mountain and looks onto vastness and a never ending horizon. The sun is setting, and the character finds peace, a scream breaks from the pit of their stomach, and it echoes past the softest winds, the sky paints itself in violet and orange. Brilliant ending, fully orchestrated by character breaking free, and nature being itself, as it always is. End credits start rolling, and you are frozen to your couch wondering what that character will do next? How will she start over? What will her life be like now that she managed to unravel and just be?
The trend nowadays, is one where struggle in most of its forms is undermined, because everyone struggles, it has become an arbitrary given, one that provides the monotone style to all that we preach.
The triumph of a good attitude over every hardship is preached like religion. And it is true, but one tiny loophole in that is the biggest pit ever.
Why should you have a good attitude?
When life gets too real, days get too rigid and boring, time collapses into a routine set of actions that almost always amount to the same outcome, our good attitude compass gets stuck on an autopilot neutral mode. Welcome to the challenge of identifying that and breaking free of it.
It is easy to know when you are feeling down, when you have a bad attitude everyone around you can tell you too. Determining the steps towards fixing the “broken” attitude come next as the natural progression to make a better life. However, the biggest dread of all is the neutrality. The “meh” attitude, the harmless sideline, the “I will just watch this day through, because I don’t want to participate”. The wallflower, not the weed.
I find this mode to be the most difficult to overcome because it is sly, it is soft. It is the comfortable couch you lay on and scroll through your Instastories, to watch other people live; in their good and bad attitudes. It is the autopilot, that tells you its good, but not good enough for you to pay any extra attention. And what happens when we live every day without paying enough attention? Well, nothing.
Nothing happens, the good and the bad all pass, and we don’t flinch. We Miss Out.
Welcome to my struggle
How do we push harder to make our experience amount to something more? How do we make sure that we do just enough to fully take in the moment? The truth is that we will miss out on a whole lot, but we will also be able to take what we get. We are able to navigate, the way way we want to, so better navigate into adventure, love, creativity and wonder.
Because i have a deep rooted fear of missing out on so much wonder in the world, because I feel bombarded by negativity, by dreadful individuals and ideologists, as though the entire world is on a good route to hell; and because nobody wants to take the wheel; I cannot shake the dread.
So maybe the best advice I can think of to myself and to you, is this: Turn off the engine. Take some time off. What happens when the autopilot is turned off? You will have to look around, you will have to assess, you will be able to learn and determine what needs to be burned to the ground, and what must be revived at all costs. On another note, I find big well acted, brilliantly produced moments to be essential too. Freedom can be taught, we can drop aspects of ourselves that are absolute trash, and we can learn to be better. We must understand how overwhelming life is, and we must be brave enough to push the brakes, and just stop, watch the damn sunset and figure out where the hell we want to go.
Find more stories like this on www.upliftingletters.com
